2014 September 10

I have long been of the opinion that MOOCs are pretty useless for college students but are good for home-schooled students and high school students who don’t have access to higher-level courses in their local schools. It seems that edX has finally realized that this is an important market with their High School Initiative:

Colleges and universities find that many students could benefit from taking a few extra courses to help close the readiness gap between high school and college. To address this need, edX has launched a high school initiative–an initial collection of 26 new online courses, including Advanced Placement* (AP*) courses and high school level courses in a wide variety of subject areas.

Completion rates will still be low, as a lot of people will sign up on a whim and then not follow through, or will sign up for more than they can handle and be forced to drop some.

AP courses will probably be the most attractive courses, as students can validate their learning with the AP exam, which is widely accepted by colleges as proof of higher-level course work (unlike the “Verified Certificate of Achievement” that edX sells).

The hardest courses to do well on line will be the lab science courses. Simulated labs are no substitute for real-world labs, as no simulation captures all the phenomena of the real world and few come close to developing lab skills.

There are on-line science courses with real lab components. For example, my son took AP chem through ChemAdvantage.com, which had some rather cleverly designed labs that could be done at home with minimal equipment. Despite the cleverness of the lab design, the lab skills practiced were not exactly the same as would have been practiced in a more traditional lab setting. And the lab kit was not cheap, costing as much as a community college chem lab course would have (if my son had been able to get into the over-subscribed chem lab course).

I don’t know whether edX has gotten their AP science courses audited by College Board (if not, they’ll probably be forced to remove the AP designation), but the AP audit requires lab time for the AP science courses, and I don’t know which of many mechanism edX is using to provide the required lab content. Other online AP courses either devise home labs (requiring the purchase of a lab kit) or do weekend or week-long lab intensives in various parts of the country. These lab intensives can be quite good (if done in college labs with real equipment) or ludicrously overpriced time wasters (if done in hotel ballrooms with crummier equipment and less time than the home lab kits).

The edX AP Physics course, created by Boston University, says “The course covers all of the material for the test, supported by videos, simulations, and online labs.” So it seems that they have no real labs in AP Physics, but only simulations. While simulation is a wonderful thing, it does not develop much in the way of real-world lab skills. I note that in the freshman design course I taught last year, often the only experience that students had had in building anything had been in their high school’s AP Physics courses. That hands-on experience is very important for developing engineers.

So the edX courses will be valuable for students who have no other access to AP-level material (which is a lot—fewer than 5% of US high schools offer AP Computer Science, for example), but students will still usually be better off finding a community college course or other way to real lab experience for the AP science lab courses.

I wish edX great success on this endeavor, since I have seen first-hand the need for reasonable quality, affordable courses for advanced high school students, which many local high schools cannot provide, because they do not have enough students ready for the course in one place to justify creating and offering the courses. It is a much more worthy market than trying to compete with brick-and-mortar colleges, which was the initial goal of Coursera, Udacity, and edX. Udacity has already abandoned that goal in favor of corporate training (again, a reasonable market). It is good to see the edX is moving in a reasonable direction also. When will Coursera realize that their original “disruptive” dream was a pipe dream (probably as soon as they’ve burned all the venture capital)?

Today I tried practicing my talk for Wednesday with my son as an audience (I figured I could get some useful feedback from him based on his years of theater experience). He asked me a number of good questions about my audience and what effect I wanted to have on them (the same sort of questions I ask my students, but often have difficulty applying myself). He gave me some good advice about changing the tone of my talk, making it more conversational and less lecturing. (I’m good at that in my usual improvisational lecture style, but I know that I couldn’t keep to time if I tried to be extemporaneous with this material.)

After getting his suggestions, I rewrote the talk and delivered it to him again. It runs about 9 minutes, and my target is “under 10 minutes”, so I think the length is about right. I welcome suggestions from my readers also—the talk isn’t until Wednesday, so I may have time to make more revisions.

Because of the time constraints, I’m going to read my talk—something I’ve never done before, so forgive me if the presentation is a bit awkward.

I want to talk to you today about two courses I created in the past two years. These courses were in part a reaction against the University pressure to create MOOCs. University education is not supposed to be mega-lecture courses, but students getting detailed feedback on their work from experts.

The courses I’m talking about are not easy, cheap fixes (like was claimed for MOOCs)—they are high-contact, hands-on courses, which take a lot of time to create and teach, and so are expensive to offer.

Designing the courses started from goals and constraints: “what problem was I trying to solve?” and “what resources were available?”

The two problems I was trying to solve were in the bioengineering curriculum:

students weren’t getting enough engineering design practice (and that mostly in the senior year, which is much too late) and

too many students were selecting the biomolecular concentration, where we were exceeding our capacity for senior capstone and senior thesis projects. The other concentrations were under-enrolled.

The main constraints were that

there was no room in the curriculum for adding more required courses,

there were no resources for new lab space or equipment, and

all existing engineering design courses had huge prerequisite chains.

Because I couldn’t ask someone else to create and teach a new course, the content had to be something I already knew or could learn quickly. So, no wet labs!

The first course I’ll talk about is a replacement for the previously required EE 101 circuits course. The EE course is a theory class that prepares students to do design in later courses—but most bioengineering students never take those later courses, so were getting prepared for something they didn’t do. (That’s a general problem in the bioengineering program—“creeping prerequistism” in the 8 or 9 departments providing courses results in the students always preparing to do stuff, and not getting to the doing until senior year.)

The goal of the new Applied Circuits for Bioengineers course is to have students design and build simple amplifiers to interface biosensors to computers. We work with a range of sensors from easy ones like thermistors, microphones, and phototransistors to more difficult ones like EKG electrodes and strain-gauge pressure sensors.

The goal is for students to do design in every lab, even the first one where they know almost no electronics, and to write detailed design reports on each lab—not fill-in-the-blank worksheets, like they get in other intro labs.

The course was designed around the weekly design projects, not around topics that must be covered. Themes emerged only after the design projects were selected—the class comes back again and again to variations on voltage dividers, complex impedance, and op amps with negative feedback.

There wasn’t a textbook available that covered things the way I wanted, so the students use free online materials instead. The savings on textbooks is used to justify a lab fee of about $130 for tools and parts. They don’t get just a few parts, but 20 each of 64 different sizes of resistors and 10 each of 25 different sizes of capacitors, along with a microprocessor board and lots of other tools and parts. I don’t want their designs to be multiple-choice questions (“there are only 5 resistors in the kit—so one of them must be the right answer”).

Coming up with usable design exercises was hard—I tried lots of them at home, rejecting some as too hard, some as too easy, and tweaking others until they seemed feasible. I even designed three different custom printed circuit boards for the course: a board for pressure sensors, a hysteresis oscillator for soldering practice, and a prototyping board for their two instrumentation-amplifier projects. (pass boards around)

By the way, PC board design has gotten very cheap—I used free tools for doing the design, and the boards themselves cost only 50¢ to $1—it would have cost thousands to have done custom boards like this when I was first hired at UCSC.

Developing a hands-on course like this is not quick—creating the course took me almost 6 months of full-time effort!—so we’re probably not going to see huge numbers of such courses being started. But they’re worth it!

To make it somewhat easier for someone who wants to create a similar course, I posted all my notes on designing the course on my blog—over 100 blog posts before class even started! There are now around 240 posts (the URL is on the quarter-page handout, along with the URL for the course syllabus and lab assignments).

The course was prototyped last year as BME 194+194F “Group Tutorial” before being submitted to CEP for approval. Incidentally, I highly recommend prototyping before submitting the paperwork for new courses—there were a lot of changes that came out of the prototype run. For example, the lab time was increased from 3 hours to 6 hours a week.

That change has a high cost—not only am I spending over 10 hours a week of direct classroom and lab time, but I’m spending every weekend this quarter rewriting all the lab handouts—splitting the material between the lab times and adding at-home or in-class design exercises between the two parts. Even with the extra lab time, some labs ran over this quarter, so I’ve got still more tweaking to do for next year.

It isn’t just the design of a new course that is expensive—each time the course is offered takes a lot of faculty time. In addition to the 10 hours a week of direct contact, I have office hours, grading, prep time for both labs and lectures, and rewriting the lab handouts. If I have 2 lab sections next year, I’ll have 16 hours a week of direct contact. Just providing feedback on the 5–10-page weekly design reports takes about 15 minutes per student per week (half an hour per report).

But enough about the circuits course.

The other course I want to talk about is one I created last quarter: a new freshman design seminar in conjunction with the student Biomedical Engineering Society. This course has no prereqs, is only 2 units, and does not count towards any major or campus requirements (it might get a “Collaborative Endeavor” gen-ed code).I’d not taught a freshman class in over a decade, having taught mainly seniors and grad students, so I had no idea what skills and interests the students would bring to the class. With no prereqs for the course, I couldn’t assume that students had any relevant skills, though it turned out that all this year’s students had had biology, chemistry, and at least conceptual physics in high school.

Because I didn’t know what to expect, I didn’t choose the projects ahead of time, but tried to adapt the course on the fly to what the students could do and what they wanted to do. (They wanted to do more than they could do in the time available, of course.)

I did try out three or four projects ahead of time, looking for design projects with a low entry barrier. But all the projects I tried assumed some computer programming skills, and only one student had ever done any computer programming—a big hole in California high school education. Even more concerning for engineering majors is that only a few had any experience building anything. (AP physics classes were the most common exposure to building something.)

On the first-day survey the students indicated an interest in learning some programming and electronics, so we did a little programming with an Arduino microcontroller board—I’ll try to up that content next year, adding some more electronics.

The class started with generic design concepts using a photospectrometer as an example. The concepts include such basics as specifying design goals and constraints, dividing a problem into subproblems, interface specification, and iterative design. The photospectrometer turned out to be too complex and unfamiliar to students, and I’ll probably start with a simpler design (perhaps a colorimeter) next year, and have the students design, build, and program it before they start on their own projects.

One positive thing—the course had more women than men, and at the end of the course they indicated that the course had made them more likely to continue in engineering!

I could go on all afternoon about these courses, but I’m running out of time, so I’ll leave you with these take-away messages:

The value of University education is in doing things and getting detailed feedback from experts, not sitting in lectures.

Students should be solving real problems with multiple solutions, not fill-in-the-blank or multiple-choice toy exercises.

Hands-on courses require a lot of time from the professors, both to create and to run, and so they are expensive to offer.

Failure to teach such courses, though, makes a University education no longer worthy of the name.

The talk I was scheduled to give last quarter (2014 Feb 24) was rescheduled, because two of the four speakers were unable to make that date. It is now scheduled for Wed 2014 Apr 23 at 3:30 in the Merrill Cultural Center, which used to be the Merrill Dining Hall, before they consolidated dining halls in the east colleges. There are now 6 speakers in 90 minutes, which means 15 minutes each (maybe 10 minutes speaking, 5 minutes for questions). I’ll have to run over from my class which ends at 3:10 on the opposite side of campus (0.6 miles, 13 minutes according to Google Maps), though running may be difficult along the crowded sidewalks between classes.

The talk needs to be updated from last quarter, as I have now taught prototype runs for both the applied circuits class and the freshman design class, and am in the second run of the applied circuits class.

Here is my current draft of the text—please give me some suggestions in the comments for improvement. The ending seems particularly awkward to me, but I’m having trouble fixing it.

Designing Courses to Teach Design

I believe that the main value of a University education does not come from MOOCable mega-lecture courses, but from students working in their field and getting detailed feedback on that work. I’ll talk today about some courses I’ve created ths year and last to teach students to do engineering design. These courses are high-contact, hands-on courses—the antithesis of MOOC courses.

Design starts from goals and constraints: “what problem are you trying to solve?” and “what resources are available?” So what were my goals and constraints?

The two problems I was trying to solve were in the bioengineering curriculum:

students weren’t getting enough engineering design practice (and what they were getting was mostly in the senior year, which is much too late) and

too many students were selecting the biomolecular concentration, where we were exceeding our capacity for senior capstone and senior thesis projects. The other concentrations were under-enrolled.

The main constraints were that

there was no room in the curriculum for adding required courses,

there were no resources for new lab space or equipment, and

all relevant engineering courses had huge prerequisite chains.

Furthermore, I would have to teach any new course myself, so the content had to be something I already knew or could learn quickly. Those constraints meant the new course would not have wet labs (though I have encouraged wet-lab faculty to add design exercises to their existing courses).

My first partial solution was to replace the required EE circuits course with a new Applied Circuits course. The existing EE101 course is a theory class (mostly applied math) that prepares students to do design in later courses—but most bioengineering students never take those later courses, so were getting prepared for something they didn’t do. Due to “creeping prerequistism” in the 8 or 9 departments providing courses for the major, the bioengineering students were already taking far too many preparatory courses and far too few courses where they actually did things.

The goal of the new course is to have students design and build simple amplifiers to interface biosensors to computers. I chose a range of sensors from easy ones like thermistors, microphones, and phototransistors to ones more difficult to interface like EKG electrodes and strain-gauge pressure sensors. I’m not interested in cookbook, fill-in-the-blank labs—I want students to experience doing design in every lab, even the first one where they knew almost no electronics—and I want them to write detailed design reports on each lab, not fill-in-the-blank worksheets, like they get in chem and physics labs, and even intro EE labs.

The course was designed around the weekly design projects, not around preset topics that must be covered. Themes emerged only after the design projects were selected—the class comes back again and again to variations on voltage dividers, complex impedance, and op amps with negative feedback.

Students used a free online textbook rather than buying one, but bought about $90 of tools and parts. I tried out every potential design exercise at home—rejecting some as too hard, some as too easy, and tweaking others until they seemed feasible. I designed and had fabricated three different printed circuit boards for the course (not counting two boards which I redesigned after testing the lab at home). One of the PC boards is a prototyping board for students to solder their own amplifier designs for the pressure-sensor and EKG labs. (Pass boards around.)

Developing a hands-on course like this is not a trivial exercise. I spent about 6 months almost full time working on the course design (without course relief). I made over 100 blog posts about the design of the course before class even started, and I now have over 230 posts (the URL is on the quarter-page handout, along with the URL for the course syllabus and lab assignments). Since the posts average a couple of pages, this is more writing than a textbook (though not nearly as organized).

The course was prototyped last year as BME 194+194F “Group Tutorial” before being submitted to CEP for approval, and I wrote up notes after each class or lab (another 60 or so blog posts). Last year’s prototyping lead me to increase the lab time from 3 hours to 6 hours a week, which means I’m spending a lot of time this quarter rewriting all the lab handouts—splitting the material between the lab times and adding at-home or in-class design exercises between the two parts. Some of the fixes have worked well (students got comfortable plotting their data with gnuplot weeks earlier this year), but we’ve still run over time in some labs, even with 6 hours a week of lab, so more tweaking is needed.

This course is expensive in terms of professor time: I’m spending over 10 hours a week of direct classroom and lab time (not counting office hours, grading, prep time, or rewriting the lab handouts). Just providing feedback on the 5–10-page weekly design reports takes about 15 minutes per student per week (half an hour per report).

The students taking Applied Circuits last year were mostly seniors who had been avoiding EE 101, rather than the sophomores I’d intended the class for. This year, I have juniors and seniors, but still no sophomores. So the course still does not provide early exposure to engineering design, nor does it direct more students to the bioelectronics concentration rather than the biomolecular one (those there’s still hope for the latter).

My second partial solution was to create a new freshman design seminar in conjunction with the student Biomedical Engineering Society. This course has no prereqs, is only 2 units, and does not count towards any major or campus requirements.

Unlike the Applied Circuits course, I didn’t choose the design projects for this course ahead of time, because I had no idea what skills and interests the students would bring to the class—I’d not taught a freshman class in over a decade, having taught mainly seniors and grad students. I did try out 3 or 4 design projects on my own to gauge the skills needed to do them, but those projects all assumed some computer programming skills.

I prototyped the freshman design course last quarter as BME 94F and have submitted course forms to CEP for approval. Once again, I blogged notes after each class meeting (only about 39 posts, though—this was a less intensive effort on my part).

With no prereqs, I couldn’t assume that students had any relevant skills, though it turned out that all this year’s students had had biology, chemistry, and at least conceptual physics in high school. Only one student had ever done any computer programming, though—a big hole in California high school education—and only a few had any experience building anything. (AP physics classes were the most common exposure to building something.) On the first-day survey the students indicated an interest in learning some programming and electronics, so we did a little programming with an Arduino microcontroller board—I’ll try to up that content next year.

I started out teaching generic design concepts using a photospectrometer as an example. The concepts include specifying design goals and constraints, dividing a problem into subproblems, interface specification, and iterative design.The photospectrometer turned out to be too complex, and I’ll probably start with a simpler colorimeter next year, and have the students design, build, and program it before they start on their own projects.

My third partial solution has been a complete overhaul of the bioengineering curriculum, which is currently before CEP for approval. No new courses were created for this overhaul, but all the concentrations were changed. For example, half the chemistry courses were removed from concentrations other than biomolecular, to make room for more courses in electronics, robotics, psychology, or computer science. And some the orphan math courses were removed from the biomolecular concentration to make room for more advanced biology. Long-term, I’m hoping to convince some of the other departments to remove excessive prerequisites, so that students can take more interesting and useful courses before their senior year.

I could go on all afternoon about these courses and curriculum design, but I’m running out of time, so I’ll leave you with these take-away messages:

The value of University education is in detailed feedback from professors in labs and on written reports, not in the lectures.

Students should be solving real problems with multiple solutions, not fill-in-the-blank or multiple-choice toy exercises.

These courses require a lot of time from the professors, and so they are expensive to offer.

Failure to teach such courses, though, makes the University education no longer worthy of the name.

For those of you not present—the quarter-page handout will have the URLs for this blog’s table of contents pages for the circuits course and the freshman design course, in addition to the two class web pages:

In addition to the quarter-page handout, I also plan to have copies of the prototyping board (both bare boards and ones that I used for testing out EKG or instrumentation amp circuits), one of the pressure sensors (on another PC board I designed), and the hysteresis oscillator boards. If I can get it working again, I may also wear the blinky EKG while I’m talking.

Preparing this talk has been weird for me—I can’t remember ever having scripted out a talk to this level of detail. For research talks, I usually spend many hours designing slides, and relying on the slides to trigger the appropriate talk. For classes, I usually think obsessively about the material for a day or two ahead of time, sometimes writing down a few key words to trigger my memory, but mainly giving an extemporaneous performance that relies heavily on audience participation. I had one memorable experience where a student asked me for a copy of my lecture notes after a class—I handed her the 1″ PostIt that had my notes, but warned her that I’d only covered the first word that day, and that it would take the rest of the week to cover the rest.

Doing this short a talk without slides and without time to rehearse will probably require me to read the talk—something else I’ve never done. (I know, I should have rehearsed during our one-week spring break, but I had a 2-day RNA research symposium, a faculty meeting about who we would offer our faculty slot to, meetings with grad students, and feverish rewriting of the first few lab handouts for the circuits course.)

2014 January 31

I forgot to type up notes after the sixth day of the freshman design seminar, because I had a meeting right afterwards. I’ll try to make up the deficit now, two days later.

At the beginning of class I collected the homework (which had originally been due Monday, but which I had given an extension on, so that students could do it right). I’ve not looked at it yet, but I could tell when I collected it that students had taken to heart the message to type up their homework and put some care into it. I hope that spills over into their other classes—not only will it benefit them, but it will help our department if the bioengineering students get a reputation for being diligent and meticulous.

Most of the class time was spent on lab tours in the Biomed building, given by four grad students who work there. The tours were good, providing students with some idea what sort of work was being done and what sort of equipment was available for doing the work. They saw high-temperature incubators for hyperthermophiles, a glovebox for working with anaerobic organisms, a qPCR machine, an ultracentrifuge, a cell sorter, a large warm room (hardly being used—there was one shaker table with one flask, which would easily have fit in a benchtop incubator), mammalian cell culture facilities, and a teaching microscope for mouse surgery. (And other stuff that I won’t bother to list here.)

The whole Biomed building seems to be half empty and even the occupied lab bays have a huge amount of space per person, especially compared to the rather cramped labs stuffed with students and researchers that we saw in Baskin a couple of weeks ago, which makes it irksome that the University administration has been preventing our department from doing recruiting for wet-lab faculty for lack of lab space. All the space is earmarked for growth in a different department, which would take them 10 years to fill (if they ever manage to do so). The space planning on our campus seems to be done by turf wars between deans with no central rebalancing, and one dean (not ours) now holds all the empty space on campus. Our dean has an unimproved warehouse 3 miles away which would cost millions to convert into anything usable, even if it made sense to exile active researchers from campus.

The lab tour ran a bit long, and half the class had to leave, but the other half got an interesting discussion about getting into research as an undergrad from a grad student who had been an undergrad here.

The e-mail mailing list for the class is still not serving its function of providing an out-of-class discussion space. Only eight students have posted anything and no student has responded to another student. The list is still useful for my making announcement (like when homework has been posted on the web site), but it isn’t working as a discussion forum. I’m apparently not very good at creating online discussions—I’ve not gotten them to work in classes yet, and even this blog has 86 views for every comment (and 40% of those comments are mine, so the ratio is more like 144 views per external comment).

I looked for some stats on MOOC discussion groups, to see how my online discussion compares with classes that are only on-line. I found a series of blog posts by Jeffrey Pomerantz where he analyzes the data for a MOOC course he is teaching. The one about online discussions showed him getting 1787 posts and 707 comments in 8 weeks, for a class whose size was 27623 total registrants, 14130 active students, 9321 video viewers, 2938 who did one homework, or 1418 who completed the course (numbers from his post about course completion). If we take the video viewers as the most realistic measure of the class size, we get about 3.3% of the students posting or commenting per week. Maybe my 60% participation in one week is not as bad as I feared, even if it doesn’t have the feel of a discussion yet.

It is a good story, as well manicured as a college quad during homecoming weekend. But there’s a problem: The man who started this revolution no longer believes the hype.

I can’t say I’m surprised. I’ve always regarded the MOOC as more of a PR gesture than an enduring way to provide college education, and I predicted that the companies doing MOOCs would drift into corporate training after burning through their initial corporate capital (if they didn’t simply fold or downsize to the level sustainable as a purely public-relations game).